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Thursday, March 12, 2015

Virtual Visit to CMS at CERN

On February 25,
2015, at 15 hours, 150 students and 10 teachers in Escola Secundária de
Penafiel (Portuguese high school), made a virtual visit to CMS at CERN.

The activity was
promoted by the European Project Open Discovery Space (ODS), and it was made,
for the first time, with a total of five portuguese schools: Escola Secundária
de Penafiel (Penafiel); Escola Secundária Ferreira Dias (Sintra); Escola
Secundária José Saramago (Mafra), Agrupamento de Escolas Dra. Laura Ayres
(Quarteira); Escola Secundária Adolfo Portela (Águeda).

The students saw
the control room, the cavern of CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment,
installed in LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and asked some questions to the
scientists.

The students made a contact with
portuguese scientists, Pedro da Silva, André David Mendes and José Carlos
Silva, with technical support of Angelos Alexopoulos, Noemi Beni e Zoltan
Zsillasi. They drove our students through CMS control room, and explained all the
graphics in their computers, to the CMS cavern, 100 meters deep, and they
explained all the objects observed, how it works and characteristics.

We achieved a
total of 553 students in this virtual visit, and it was established a new
record of students participating in a same session. All the students were
pleased to visit virtually this especial science center.

Some feedback
from our students:

“Hello teacher, I would like to thank you the
opportunity to participate in something unique.
For students that study Physics, CERN is the epicenter of investigation and
knowledge. I loved the fact that we made contact with scientists and it was so
fun how they present the detector and technologies provided by CERN. It was
useful to extend the knowledge of tiny world despite the fact that we need such
a huge machine, like CMS, to discover that world. To see all of this visit in
real time image was exceptional...

Thanks to all, specially people at CERN and our
teachers to make this happened.” - André Queirós

"Hello teacher, I'm written this email about
our virtual visit to CERN. It was a visit that arises our interest and
curiosity to know better CERN and the experiments made by scientist. The simple
language used by scientists helps us to understand the experiments, and kept
students' attention.

I liked to thank the availability and I hope someday
to know CERN even better." - Ana Catarina Moreira

"Hello teacher, I like to thank you for the
visit, even virtually, it was very good and educative. I hope to perform
another visit, but this time a live one. I was curious on CERN center and LHC
detectors, and the explanation of both made by site scientists.

I wish a year full of success and with new
discoveries!" - João Pereira.

"Hello teacher, the virtual visit was very
interesting, now I understand what happen in there and what scientists do, how
do they do it and the level to acquire such performance in science and
technology. It was important to see the detector and jobs possibilities to
students. Thank you so much for this opportunity" - Tiago Carvalho